Recently, I became aware that the Fourth Avenue Church of Christ hired a female preaching intern. I did not become aware of this through any direct connection with the congregation, but through a series of declamations and comments posted on Faceb...
For me, there is a deep philosophical conflict that runs underneath everything I do and think. It makes me constantly question and measure and analyze — holding everything I’m doing up to inspection, trying to figure out how it matches to the two ...
It’s about time I have a recommended reading list. If you want to get inside my head (why would you want that??!!), this is what you need to read.
Non-fiction:
The Physics of Immortality (Frank Tipler)
This book is a mind-warping exploration of...
The hardest thing to believe in the New Testament isn’t that a guy rose from the dead. For the disciples, the hardest thing to believe was that they were going to come to possess the Roman Empire, and build a new civilization, and it was all going...
I’m a Christian. That means that I think that a certain set of memes — memes which started in first-century Israel, and very quickly spread out into the rest of the world — are very significant.
As time went on, those memes profoundly reshaped th...
I watched Atlas Shrugged last night. Not a great movie. Nevertheless, it was thought-provoking in several ways.
One might be forgiven for thinking that this movie was about politics. The cameo appearances from political pundits, the focus on gove...
Many people who use the word “orthodoxy” as a weapon, think of it as an insistence on picking the one correct answer out of many possible. I think this misses the point pretty badly. Orthodoxy isn’t the insistence on finding the one correct answer...
I hear a lot about how our society sells us on consumerist wants, how magazines convince us we look ugly and need to look better, how car commercials make us lust after cars we don’t need, how our whole economy is premised on the empty ideal of ke...
I’m a conservative in that I know the world is complex, and I know that simplistic and feel-good solutions don't often fix things. I look for the mechanisms that make the world go. I know there is a deep wisdom in the way things are, and I’m skept...
When I think of consumerism, I think of companies without values — or more precisely, companies without opinions. That is, they’re not doing anything wrong, but they’re also not fighting for anything right.
But should they be? To what degree do w...
It’s very common to hear people re-iterate the fact that we are human.
“I’m only human”
“I’m finally getting in touch with my own humanity”
“The inhuman treatment of prisoners…”
But nailing down just what is being talked about is a little tricky...
A few months ago I went to see the Lego Movie with my friends.
It provoked a lot of thoughts. I started thinking about how we approach the raw materials of the world around us, how we think about creativity, and how we deal with our own limitatio...
Lately, a lot of people have been talking about embodiment. From theologians and philosophers, to environmentalists and activists, there is a lot of concern with how we think of ourselves, and our relationship with the physical world.
René Descar...
I think that there are three strains of religious and spiritual transhumanism.
The first seeks to understand and commit more deeply to its own religious heritage, and in doing so, discovers a call to creation, cultivation of life, and self-transc...
These are my thoughts in response to this question:
Would a dominant pantheistic or pagan cultural tradition have prepared the West better for the reality of intelligent machines?
The way I tend to approach things is by looking through the le...
This was written circa 1999, and circulated on some mailing lists and publishing sites at the time.
The New Testament says, "the law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ..." When Jesus came, the law was no longer needed. It was fulfilled.
Ma...
Two of the most significant articles I’ve read recently address the question of why millennials are leaving the church. First, there was this piece by Rachel Evans:
Why millennials are leaving the church
And then, this by Justin Hanvey:
When I ...
Transhumanism is the ethical use of technology to extend human ability, and to improve the human condition.
Transhumanism holds that we should not be limited by the way things are, or by the way they have been in the past; that we should not resi...
A year ago, I was traveling across the world. I had just moved out of my house, taken a leave of absence from my part-time job, and left without a lot of money or a good sense of whether I would be employed when I got back.
I slept on hard floors...
There is a lot of negativity these days about the state of the world. There’s always been a lot of negativity, so I guess that’s not surprising. What is surprising is how this negativity persists despite the fact that the world is doing amazingly,...
Lately I've been reading about technology in the ancient world, and just how close Greece and Rome came to kicking off the industrial revolution 1500 years early.
Why didn't it happen?
Nobody knows the answer for sure. But there are some likely...
On May 21, 2011, I was sitting in a steel-roofed building as a powerful storm pounded down outside.
This is the day that Harold Camping had said the world would end.
After decades of bible study, he had become so convinced of this that he gather...
I have always been drawn to things which are bitter-sweet.
Well, at least since I was 15. I remember hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as a kid, and wanting to turn it off because it was so depressing.
But if I was hyper-sensitive to sadness as...
I hope that one day humanity will assess its gifts, its skills, and its history, and come to the conclusion that our purpose in this world is to cultivate and create life.
Certainly, this is what we have always done — not just in procreating, but...
The Problem of Evil is the apparent contradiction between the idea that God is infinitely loving, and the fact that he created us in a world with such intense suffering.
It’s a serious problem for Christianity — and it’s probably one of the main ...